What's That Smell in the Kitchen?

Lieke van der Vorst

What's That Smell In the Kitchen?

All over America women are burning dinners.
It's lamb chops in Peoria; it's haddock
in Providence; it's steak in Chicago;
tofu delight in Big Sur; red
rice and beans in Dallas.
All over America women are burning
food they're supposed to bring with calico
smile on platters glittering like wax.
Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined
but spewing out missiles of hot fat.
Carbonized despair presses like a clinker
from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.
If she wants to grill anything, it's
her husband over a slow fire.
If she wants to serve him anything
it's a dead rat with a bomb in its belly
ticking like the heart of an insomniac.
Her life is cooked and digested
nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.
Look, she says, once I was roast duck
on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

Marge Piercy


Cooking and food are such rich topics for thought and conversation. All of life can be discussed in terms of food.  After all, what is more personal than preparing the meal that sustains a human being? But then there's the cook. Does she add to the flavour? Is her mood or intent an ingredient of the sauce? You better believe it. Cooking can be love, but it can be battle just as well.  Be good to the cook.

Snowdrops

Raymond Booth

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived?  You know

what despair is; then

winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,

earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect

to waken again, to feel

in damp earth my body

able to respond again, remembering

after so long how to open again

in the cold light

of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again

crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

Louise Gluck

"Do you know how I lived?" I think this must be the cry of everyone who has lived through trauma and death. There's this great burden of pain and isolation that screams inside, "You don't know me! You don't know how I live! You don't know what I'm going through!" And yet, we can't express it, either. We know there is no true way of explaining it. We know it won't be grasped. This is a powerful poem because it acknowledges all that, even the "I did not expect to survive", which is something we don't talk about much, but some of us have lived through things we feel should have killed us. It is strange and disorienting to find one's self still breathing. How can it be? How is it my body still cycles on? How is it the days pass? Something died. Something was injured and killed within me. There has been blackness and despair and anger and grief, and yet I open my eyes and find I'm still here. Whether I want to be or not. In the poem this is called Winter. Winter is death, dormancy, burial. But it is a season. And seasons pass. And then the most surprising thing of all happens. We discover we're not dead, we're a seed. And a new pain comes, the visceral pain of breaking out of our seed-casing, of pushing up against the blackness that covers us, of rising in spite of the fear we feel. "Crying yes risk joy". I don't know of a better way to say it.